The government has announced plans for elected police commissioners tasked with making local policing democratically accountable – though details of the proposal, a Conservative manifesto commitment, are still being hammered out. Chief constables are disturbed by the idea and cling to the hope that the government will back down. If they do not, the proposal will face a turbulent ride through the House of Lords where ennobled former police chiefs and home secretaries are readying themselves for battle.

But we have been round this track before. In the 1980s the idea of democratic policing was the subject of sharp controversy between chief constables and Labour-controlled authorities. At that time, the Conservative party stood firm with chief officers in defence of what they saw as the cornerstone of the policing tradition: constabulary independence. There has clearly been a volte-face in Tory thinking. But how should those on the liberal left respond?

One option is to align oneself with the chief officers, police authorities and politicians who will mobilise against the plans in order to defend the institutions and ethos of British policing. A delicate balance of competing and overlapping powers between home secretary, chief constable and police authority, underpinned by the idea that no politician can instruct a police constable what to do, forms a system that has evolved over nearly 200 years and generally served us well. It may today be frayed and in need of attention and repair, but one messes with its fundamentals at one's peril.

Yet this, it seems, is precisely what the government proposes. The critics charge that the Conservatives are in thrall to a US model of policing alien to the British way of doing things. They are baffled by the constitutionally novel idea of electing someone to control a single public service in isolation from all else. They fear populist politicians bossing chief officers around in the search for votes and trampling over the liberties of minority groups. They worry that these directly elected individuals will have the power to hire and fire chief constables who will come and go after each election – a fear exacerbated by recent experiences in London. The fear of a BNP politician running the police is a remote, but not entirely spurious, one. There are good reasons to oppose and resist.

Yet this would be a mistake, and an opportunity missed. In the 1980s, critics of the tripartite system properly complained about the problems of democratic legitimacy found in a system that permitted chief officers to set policing policy. Good reasons were offered then – and hold now – for designing political institutions that place responsibility for strategic priority-setting in the hands of elected politicians. It is perfectly possible to do this while guarding against local tyrannies, protecting operational responsibility, and without turning chief officers into docile automatons. Today there is a strong case for using policing as a vehicle for creating responsive and effective democratic institutions which can foster informed and inclusive debate about local problems and priorities, and generate public confidence in both police and politics.

Elected commissioners may not be the best way of giving these aspirations institutional form. But the government is asking the right questions and thinking seriously about how, in a post-deferential age, we can make local policing democratically accountable. It is important that the government does not cave in to pressure from the Platonic guardians of an exhausted tradition. But it is equally important that those with a commitment to democratic policing ensure that they get this right.

Ian Loader is professor of criminology at the University of Oxford and the author of Public Criminology?